The Vastness of the Universe in a Nutshell

The Known Universe: Up to the Afterglow of the Big BangThe universe is big. It’s really hard to grasp the concept of the universe, though, since we have only been on Earth. Stars in the sky always seem so small. It’s hard to imagine how big the universe is, so here’s a helpful video I found by the American Museum of Natural History.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U

As you can see, the universe is quite big. A light-year is about 2.387 billion times the distance from Los Angeles to New York (in a straight line, of course). Imagine now 5 billion light-years. That’s the approximate diameter of the entire universe.

As you can see, even the Earth isn’t big — less than a tenth of a second if light traveled around its circumference.

Stars, on the other hand, are huge. The Sun, a relatively small star, could hold around 1.3 million Earths. That’s a LOT.

Betelgeuse, a red giant star about 640 light-years from Earth, is about 1,000 suns across. That’s one of the biggest stars we know. Since it’s that close, we can expect many more stars like that.

Enough talk. The universe is huge. If you saw the part where they zoomed out of the Milky Way, you can see how insignificant the Milky Way is to the rest of the galaxy. There are millions of galaxies out there that could be just like our Milky Way.

Look how small we are once again.

And you thought that the Empire State Building or the new skyscraper in Dubai was big!

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9 thoughts on “The Vastness of the Universe in a Nutshell

  1. Five billion light years in diameter? You are so incredibly way off on this. You should be careful to have your facts straight before posting articles for the world to read. The diameter of the OBSERVABLE universe is about 93 billion light years.

    The universe is currently estimated to be about 13.7 billion years old, and the universe is expanding MUCH faster than the sped of light, prety basic math there is you stop for a moment to think about it, which you clearly have not. Good job!

  2. In addition to that, they didn’t “zoom out of the Milky Way to compare the Milky Way to the rest of the galaxy”, the Milky Way IS the galaxy. You must have meant to say; “when they zoom out of the SOLAR SYSTEM…” and then you could compare the SOLAR SYSTEM to the rest of the (Milky Way) galaxy.

    • Or, you might also have meant, “you can see how insignificant the Milky Way is to the rest of the UNIVERSE”, that also would make sense.

  3. It seems we all, always miss the point. Here the talk is about the vastness of the universe and the insignificance of earth and we are one out of 7 billion people currently living on this planet. But still everyone of us wants to show how learned, informed and knowledgeable he/she is compared to others. It seems we will always remain arrogant.

  4. All the galaxies are within the first heaven
    and there are 7 heavens
    and if the first heaven is compared with the second heaven
    it is as small as a tiny ball in a big ground

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